I called him by his first name. I sat in a comfortable chair across from Bert and for an hour we talked about the factory applications of teletouch technology. He chuckled and clucked. I crossed my legs at the knee. I said, “Exactly, Bert.” He showed me papers and we talked about numbers and by the front right foot of my chair there was a briefcase containing a gun.
It was 12:07 p.m. when Bert closed the binder on his desk and offered me another salami sub of a handshake.
“Well there we are.”
“Always a pleasure.”
“Joanie and I should have you over for dinner. Bring a lady friend.”
“Yes,” I said, picking up my briefcase.
“You still seeing that blonde? What was her name? Judith?”
I shook Bert’s hand again. He walked me to the elevator. We waited for it to open. There was a janitor at the end of the hallway, sweeping. He kept scrutinizing me. I noticed that despite his dusty coveralls he wore polished leather shoes. He swept the floor like a man who did not often sweep the floor. He had eyes like nails.
The elevator opened.
“Good day,” Bert Grimes said to me.
I said, “Have a swell one.”
The elevator closed. I smiled at the operator, the same one from earlier, a Negro with a birthmark on his chin.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Thank you.”
“Yessir.”
We descended. The elevator did not stop at the second floor. As we approached the ground level I slapped my forehead. “Tarnation,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I forgot something. Back at 372.”
“Wanna go back?”
“Please.”
“Yessir.” The operator pushed a button and pulled a lever and the elevator bucked in the shaft. We began to rise. I was recalling the map of the Dolores Building, the floor plan folded into the pocket of my jacket, imagining its borders expand and rotate.
“It was important,” I said.
“Yessir.”
The air in the elevator felt cool and perfect. The operator was in a good mood. He thought we were travelling companions, co-participants in a misadventure. We were not. When we arrived again at the third floor I nodded to him, told him not to wait. “Good luck, sir,” he said, and I stepped into the corridor, which was empty, and made as if to walk the twenty steps to Bert Grimes’s office: right, left, straight ahead.
Instead, when the elevator’s doors closed, I pivoted on my toe. I leaned into the heavy door that led to the stairwell. I unfastened the button of my jacket and I climbed the stairs, briskly, without touching the handrail.
I climbed to the eighth floor.
The walls were painted silver and the floor was made of silver linoleum and the doors were painted in the colours one expects of bank vaults: fiery red, hunter green, lightning silver. I proceeded down a hallway. Each door was marked with a number: 872, 874, 876. Most were closed but through two, wedged open, I saw harmless men eating lunch.
I came to an intersection. I did not need the map folded in eighths in my pocket. I remembered it. I turned left. I held a briefcase concealing a gun. I came to another intersection. I turned right. There were steel doors, glass doors, wooden doors—845, 843, 841. Now the faces behind the doors were of men less harmless-looking. Their eyes flicked up when they saw me pass. They sat with filing cabinets filled with secrets. I was the wind moving through trees. I turned left and pushed through a door with a decal of the American flag. This corridor was empty. My steps echoed. I walked more softly—826, 824. As I approached 818 I found I was holding my breath. I breathed. With my index finger I brushed a skim of sweat from my upper lip.
I turned a corner and the janitor, the janitor I had seen downstairs, the janitor with eyes like hammered pieces of carbonized steel, was sweeping dust from a clean-swept floor. His head was downturned but when I arrived around the corner his whole body tilted, swivelled, and he was facing me, slightly stooped, with a set jaw.
“Hello,” he said.
His shoes were too fine for a janitor.
“Hello,” I said.
I was standing in front of the door marked 818. It was grey. The key that Lev had given me was in my hand, cold, like a blade. The janitor had still not looked away. I had still not looked away. I smiled primly. I turned the key in the lock and went into room 818 and I shut the door behind me, standing with my back to it. I listened. There was a thin line of light under the door. I waited. I was silent. I could not hear anything. I could not hear breathing or footsteps or the sweeping of dust. It was pitch black in room 818 and if the janitor was an agent, an agent of something, then at this instant he was listening too. His ear was at the same level as mine, on the other side of this door. He was calculating what I was doing, where I stood, whether I was armed. He was the United States of America and I was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was reaching into his coveralls and withdrawing a loaded gun.
I crouched in the darkness. The floor tile was coloured by the thin band of hallway light. I placed my briefcase on the floor and I opened its clasps and they were deafeningly loud and I imagined the janitor kicking through the door and knocking me prone. I imagined bullets. I took the revolver in my hand and I put my hand in my jacket pocket and I stood, and I turned the doorknob. Then I pushed open the door in one swift extraordinary movement and my finger was tensed on the trigger of my gun, concealed in my pocket, and my eyes were trained on the place in the air where I would see a steely stare.
He was not there. The corridor was deserted.
I went back into 818. I turned on the lights. It was a small storage room filled with filing cabinets. There was no way to lock the door from the inside. I picked up the briefcase and I put it on a table in the centre of the room. I placed the gun beside it. I took off my jacket and set my hands flat on the surface of the table, where I stared at them. I stood like that until I had stopped trembling.
Then I raised my head and took the hooked pins from my pocket and read the labels on the locked cabinets whose entrails I had been sent to steal.
SOME THINGS ARE EASY to break: you throw them against a wall, you murmur a few words. Some things are less fragile. They cannot be carelessly ruined. Locks are like this: to break their purpose you must know them fully, as you would know certain faces. You must understand the flick and tick of tumblers, the swivel of nooks in metal. I did not know how to pick a lock. I tapped the first small silver circle. I peered at it. I wondered how long it would be until someone came into this room and found me tampering with boxes that did not belong to me. I had no time for failures. The lock was just a complicated thing that would come undone, like so many complicated things had come undone. I tapped the lock again. I imagined other locks I had seen, the greased fit, and I evaluated the size and style of the mechanism before me. In my hand were my two pins, my lock picks — one like a flattened piece of steel, hooked; one like a strong wire, bent. I considered the way these tools could be used. I took the first and I jammed it into the lock. It remained there, wedged. I fitted the second above it. This movement had no sound. I pushed inside slowly, softly, feeling for a skirting touch. Tiny grooves, sensitive places. The tools were loose in my hands. I found the faintest ridges at the top of this channel. I stroked these ridges with needle-tip. I felt hidden and very strong.
Pins trembled. My hands moved. I sensed precise small changes; pressure, movement. I pressed sideways on the first, larger pick, and the whole lock seemed to quiver. Once more, and a click, and the cabinet’s whole deep drawer shuddered out into my chest.